Round the world it seems as if the next generation of Ronald
McDonalds will come with Michelin stars, or at least a hat. Ferran
Adria has his own fast food chain and the likes of Gordon Ramsay,
Joel Robuchon and Mario Batali all seem to have more restaurants
than fingers - and in Alain Ducasse's case, fingers and toes. In
fact it's hard to find a global Top 10 chef who hasn't tried to
leverage his celebrity into a small slice of global culinary
domination.

Here, too, our own top chefs are stepping up to the plate. Neil
Perry's recent opening here is one example; another comes from
Melbourne's own culinary wunderkind Shannon Bennett, who now has a
cafe with potential catering implications and a French bistro that
will open soon.

Bennett's expansion is slightly more restrained as both new
operations trade on the same CBD site as his restaurant, Vue de
monde.

We concern ourselves here, however, with Cafe Vue. The hirsute
one has bought a slick cafe concept from Illy and customised it
into something even slicker. The red colour scheme comes with
rough-hewn wood cubes as tables and what look like over-sized corks
as seats. Outside this glass-sided box is a little walkway of raw
brick clad with a chain mail mesh. Here battleship-grey benches
line a couple of tables clothed and laid with butcher's paper.

And while my potent little espresso comes in a signature cup
that exhorts the drinker to "dream", if you do dream it's likely to
be about mounting a frontal assault on the cake cabinet, which is
packed with expressions of Vue de monde pastry chef Darren
Purchese's skill. His pistachio cup cakes come across as a tightly
formed moist rubble of little green nuts rather than cake. Other
notables are a silky, super-rich chocolate tart and little pastry
basins filled with pear.

Standards don't slip in the savoury offerings either, whether
it's a baguette filled with Wagyu or a toastie of olive sourdough
filled with tuna and egg mayo or rocket and Tom Cooper's smoked
salmon dusted with chips of caper. There are also soups such as
zucchini, mint and veg, and a very fine asparagus vichyssoise with
smoked haddock that was more pale creamy spears than potato.

For lunch, the popular choice is the $15 lunch box. This
stylishly signed, red-sleeved cardboard box contained, when we were
there, a ham and cheese toastie (being a Vue toastie, the ham was
made from a trendy Kurobuta pig), a little cup of trad waldorf
salad and a small serve of rabbit rillettes under a thick
set-butter crust. The shredded bunny was excellent but the
combination of the butter seal and well-oiled croutons (to eat the
rillettes on) meant an overly rich mouthful if you weren't careful.
There was also a cup cake, in our case one of those divine
pistachio ones.

They charge a dollar less for an espresso than a latte, which
appeals, and make their own verbena lemonade. It should be noted,
however, that if you like your cafe lunch cheap, cheerful and eaten
off laminex you might baulk at the bill. Especially if you can't
resist buying another of those pistachio cupcakes to take away.